Fear is the Question
by CrimeSceneIdiot
Summary: Each member of the Leverage team has their own personal terrors. Fortunately, they don't have to face them alone.


The title is part of a quote from Rain Bojangles. The entire quote is 'Fear is the question. Love is the answer.' This fic is unbeta-ed, so I claim full responsibility for any mistakes. Also, this is cross-posted at AO3 under the name 'Yavemiel'. Enjoy! :)

**x-x**

_Hitter_

Eliot is afraid of death. Not for himself, because to be honest, if he was afraid of dying, he would never have made it as a retrieval specialist. It would be more correct to say that Eliot is afraid of losing people close to him to death. He has cause (let's just say that Parker isn't the only one to have lost a sibling to an untimely death), but he still views it as an unacceptable weakness. He knows by now that there is no ridding himself of it, so in an effort to curb its effect on his retrievals, he worked alone for almost seven years, refusing to allow anyone close, until now.

Of course, even the threat of a shoe-shopping marathon with Sophie couldn't make Eliot admit out loud that he cares for his teammates. His affection is expressed by more tangible means: cooking dinner for them all after a job, putting in extra hours on the job to make sure he has exit strategies planned out for each team member, and of course wading into any situation no matter what the odds to make sure they all make it out alive.

Eliot knows that his job is more complicated now: he's self-aware enough to admit to himself what the team is to him, his family, even if he'll never admit it to them. He sticks with it though, because there are upsides that outweigh the tight knot of fear that lodges in his stomach every time Sophie approaches a dangerous mark or Parker launches herself off a building.

Every time Hardison overplays a role or Nate suggests an insane plan that makes his heart leap into his throat, he remembers that Sophie always makes him soup if he's hurt, even though she can't really cook to save her life and that Parker offered to loan him her Bunny after learning that he only sleeps for 90 minutes a night, even though Bunny is the only thing that helps her sleep. He remembers that Hardison always shows up at his door asking for a sparring partner after a bad con, even though Hardison hates sparring, and when he was injured bad enough to be taken to a hospital, he woke to Nate sitting by his bed, even though it was taking every ounce of his self control to stay there.

The team notices, obviously. There's only so many times he can say 'Damnit Hardison!' or throw himself into life-threatening situations on their behalf before they notice a certain protectiveness on his part. However, it's when the notes start that he realises that they're really onto him. They don't spend all their time together. It wouldn't be feasible: they're all fairly solitary people who need to spend a bit of time alone to keep from going insane. That doesn't stop Eliot from worrying whenever one of his teammates is out of his reach, but he grits his teeth and reminds himself that they all got along just fine before he was there to take care of them, and they'll do just fine now.

Surprisingly, it's Hardison who leaves the first note. The hacker isn't always particularly adept at reading people, but one morning before Hardison disappears for the weekend, Eliot receives a text message which simply says, 'Gone 2 san diego 4 comiccon. Bak monday. B cool man.' And it doesn't stop there. Sophie leaves him a note in beautiful calligraphy to let him know that she's gone to meet up with a friend in Baltimore for a few days, while Nate's characteristic scrawl tells him that an old buddy needs help in San Fran. Parker leaves a note in block capitals, the tone of which is characteristically Parker: 'Gone to steal hope diamond. Back Friday. P.'

He never tells them, of course, but Eliot finds it comforting to know where his team is at all times. That way, if he needs to bail them out in a hurry, at least he won't have to go searching. And if he goes out of his way to make sure he knows each team member's favourite meal so that he can make it when they return, well, that's really nobody's business but his own.

_Hacker_

It's no secret that Hardison's afraid of small spaces. It comes up on jobs frequently, every time Parker has to navigate a ventilation system and the hacker swears up and down that they will never, ever con him into crawling through one of those death traps, nuh-uh, no matter what the job. Parker responds by making a derogatory comment about one of Hardison's beloved sci-fi movies, and Nate, Sophie or Eliot breaks in before the con can descend into all-out geek war.

Hardison doesn't have some dark secret in his past that led to his deathly fear of tight spaces. He might have grown up in the foster system, but he was definitely one of the lucky ones, finding his Nana almost immediately after his parent's death and moving from one happy home to another. His Nana might have shut him in his room once or twice, but there was none of this cupboard-under-the-stairs-with-no-food-for-a-week kind of stuff that so many foster horror stories came out with. Hardison liked to think of his fear of tight spaces as a natural reaction to being in a life-threatening situation. After all, there's only so much air that can fit in a small space, and no air means suffocation.

It's different after the job in the funeral home with the Wicketts though. A mild phobia of being in enclosed spaces turns into a panic-induced hysteria at the mere thought of being somewhere dark and small. The darkness starts to becomes almost as much of a problem as the claustrophobia, and Hardison starts sleeping with a lamp on at night, because when it's completely dark he feels like the blackness is sucking the oxygen from the air, making his lungs struggle to pull in enough air. Logically he knows he's having a panic-attack, but that doesn't change his reaction.

The team notices of course. It's kind of hard to miss the way Nate's apartment a.k.a. their base of operations is always brightly lit, even during the day, and because they understand about pride as well as fear, they never, ever mention it. It's the same thing with Lucille. Hardison's pride and joy becomes his nemesis, because there's no way he can have the interior of the van brightly lit during all their cons: they're all thieves at heart, even Nate, and thieves tend to operate at night. Nothing gives away your position quite like a van that's lit up from the inside with a spotlight.

The team deals with it the way they deal with everything else, quickly and without fuss. For the next couple of jobs they run 3-man cons almost exclusively and Hardison is never once left alone in the van. Nate sits beside him and points out key points in the cons, remembering that the hacker expressed an interest in running his own team someday. Sophie keeps up a running commentary on…well, everything, from the new clothes she bought for a song to the actions of their teammates on camera. Eliot compromises his position as a man of few words to advise Hardison on all different types of strategy, and when he runs out of ideas, he teaches Hardison to cover his tells in rock, paper, scissors. Parker says very little, just sits so close to him that he should probably find it claustrophobic, but it has just the opposite effect. Every time he catches a whiff of her unique jasmine scent, he feels the little knot of fear inside him unravel just a little bit more.

Eventually, he can stand to be in the van by himself, but he almost doesn't notice his progress. It only really hits home how far he's come after a job where he hides inside a storage closet to escape a security team hot on his heels. He doesn't realise until after the job that he didn't freak out in the dark, enclosed space, focused as he was on getting the job done. Although…he looks up as Eliot puts a plate of food down in front of him, and somehow he's not surprised to see pan-seared steak with vegetables and new potatoes (his favourite meal). He glances at the bottle of beer in his hand and then around the table at the rest of the team as they laugh and joke, and it dawns on him that while he may not have noticed his triumph, the rest of the team did, and this…this is their celebration dinner.

He wonders briefly if he should say something, maybe a thank you, but decides against it. It would almost make be an insult to mention it…of course, that doesn't mean that Parker isn't going to get some extra-thin fibre glass cable, that Eliot won't get the sweet flat-screen Hardison's had his eye on for months, or that Nate and Sophie won't get the earpieces he designed on a different frequency just for them so that they can speak and be sure no-one's listening in. He smiles to himself as he tucks into his dinner, before launching into a full-scale war (of words) with Eliot when he attacks the original Star Wars movies. 'Cause he ain't gonna stand for _that_ kind of thing. Nuh-uh.

_Grifter_

Sophie is terrified of disappointment. Well, more accurately, she's terrified of disappointing other people. Not that she loves that feeling where your stomach drops towards your toes herself, but she would rather someone slap her in anger than look at her with a face that clearly says, "You're not good enough."

The less-perceptive might point out that Sophie's hatred of disappointment stems from a deep-seated fear of abandonment which took root when her mother left when she was young: old enough to remember, but not old enough to realise that it wasn't her fault. Those same unperceptive people might also point out that her mother's departure left Sophie in the care of her upper-class British father whom she could never impress no matter how hard she tried and who delegated her care to a string of nannies. Sophie herself knew that none of this was true. She just hated to see people feel bad, that's all it was. Really.

She's never really sure how much the team catches on. They say you can't con a conman, but Sophie is one of the best grifters in the world and she knows it. For the first year, she keeps her mask firmly in place. She likes Nate (maybe even loves, but he's not ready for that now, maybe never will be), but she's wary of the others. She knows of them by reputation of course (though when she first heard of Hardison, he was going by the ridiculous moniker 'Hackmeister'), but she's not sure about them outside of their professional capacity.

The longer the team stays together, the more comfortable she becomes, especially after she leaves and comes back and they all know her real name. Eventually the mask begins to slip and she can feel more of herself being exposed. She knows the team notices, especially Nate, who latches onto her with laser-like focus on her return.

They all notice her special efforts to please them, even Parker, who isn't known for being hugely perceptive. She mothers them all ceaselessly and in return, her sharp-tongued bunch of cons become less critical when it comes to her.

Eliot starts coaching her in self-defence (and a bit of attack too) and a critical word never passes his lips unless it's followed by some praise for an aspect of the move she did right, no matter how small. Nate allows her greater input into the cons and complains much less, which for him could be considered the equivalent of outright praise.

Parker stays completely silent as Sophie helps her assemble a rig, but when she's done, Parker gifts her with a proper smile (the one she normally reserves for Hardison and money) and says "Well done," and Sophie glows despite herself. Hardison starts teaching her how to run complex web searches and gives her the basics on Photoshop, and she can honestly say she's never met such a patient teacher.

Mostly though, the team accepts her for whoever she is: it's not like she's sure herself, so that's actually pretty impressive. When she turns around one day and finds that she's not afraid of what they think anymore, it doesn't really surprise her as much as she would have expected.

_Thief_

Parker isn't afraid of much. She's not afraid of pain or heights or dying or enclosed spaces and most of the time she doesn't care what people think of her. In fact, it's pretty safe to say that before Parker met the rest of her team (her family) she wasn't really afraid of anything.

If she had ever thought about it, she would have assumed it made her stronger. It's a lot easier to be the world's best thief if you're not afraid of anything, and Parker is definitely the best.

Ever since she met the team it's different though. At first she's just along for the ride, because she might be the best thief in the world, but the five of them together are pretty much unstoppable and besides, it's the most fun she's had in like forever.

They've been together for months the first time she feels it, through countless death-defying situations. They've got the comms in like always and she can hear some scumbag threatening Hardison at gunpoint. Eliot is incoming, but he's still a minute out, held up by more scumbags and the only thing standing between Hardison and certain death is his own fast talk and suddenly Parker's heart starts beating too fast, echoing in her ears. Her hands start to shake and she can feel cold sweat beading on her forehead.

Sixty seconds later, Eliot is there and the gunman is dispatched with more force than is strictly necessary, the job continues and Parker forces her heart rate to slow and her hands to steady. She thinks back on it later and tries to convince herself that she was angry, but Parker's been angry plenty of times and she knows it feels nothing like that.

She writes it off as a fluke, possibly a side effect of that cold that she's recovering from. But then it happens again, when Eliot goes radio silent during a con that required him to put his life in the hands of their bad guy and again, when Sophie screams sharply and then says nothing, though that turns out to be nothing more than a sprained ankle from walking too fast in her heels, and again, when Nate starts deliberately provoking a madman with a gun so that he'll make a confession. It happens again and again, every time something bad happens on a con, and though she tries to ignore it, eventually Parker has to admit to herself that there may be something seriously wrong.

She decides to ask Eliot about it. Normally she would go to Sophie, but Sophie is pre-occupied with Nate drinking himself into a stupor. She could go to Nate, but everyone knows how Nate feels about hospitals, and if she is really sick then she doesn't want to remind him of his son. She could go to Hardison too, but she knows he likes her (and she kind of likes him too, the giant geek) and if it's bad news, she wants to have time to consider it before presenting it to Hardison.

So she corners Eliot one day in the kitchen while he's trying to cook dinner and the other three are sitting outside bickering about the technicalities of their latest con. She hops up on the kitchen counter beside him and starts stealing bites out of his pot of curry. He glares at her, but she can tell that it's half hearted. He's never really minded her baiting him. He also doesn't feel the need to chat needlessly, which Parker appreciates. He just continues making dinner and letting her steal it when he's not looking until she's worked up the courage to say what needs to be said.

"I think I'm sick."

That gets his attention immediately. His knife stops moving and he stares at her for a moment before resuming his attack on the onions with more force, with a tension in his shoulders that wasn't there before. "What makes you think that?"

She explains, hesitantly at first, then with the words coming so fast that she almost trips over them, about the symptoms she's been experiencing during cons, the shakes and the sweats and the arrhythmic heartbeat. She trails off as his shoulders start shaking, and for a moment she thinks he's crying, and crap, she knew it had to be bad, but if it's bad enough to make _Eliot_ cry…then she takes a closer look and realises that he's laughing, and suddenly she's furious.

"What's so funny?"

Eliot looks up at her with a big grin painted across her face. "Parker, you ain't sick."

Oh. "I'm not?"

"Course not. You were just gettin' scared. Ain't you ever been scared before?"

She thinks about it carefully. She knows what scared is, obviously, she's not stupid, but as she thinks about it, she realises that she has no personal experience of being scared. "No."

Eliot pauses again in his cooking. "Really?"

"Yes. I mean no. I mean, yes, I've really never been scared."

Eliot stares at her for a moment longer. "Huh," he says, and goes back to chopping (garlic now).

Silence descends and Parker thinks about fear and being scared. It seems unfair somehow, that she should have gone so long without being scared, and now she's suddenly being burdened with it. She says as much to Eliot, who chuckles. "Sweetheart, everybody gets scared. You've had this comin' a long time."

"But why now?" Even as she says it, she suspects she knows the answer, but she wants Eliot to confirm it for her.

"Weeelll…" he draws out, clearly unwilling now that they've come to crux of the matter. "I guess…you didn't really have any reason to be scared before."

"Like what?"

He glares at her, a faint flush rising in his cheeks. "Like now you have people that you care about and you don't wanna see them hurt. It's normal."

He starts stirring the curry with more vigour than needed, as Parker thinks about being normal, rolling the word around in her head. It's not really one she's ever applied to herself before. A thought occurs to her.

"Wait…do you get scared for us when we're on jobs? Cos you care about us?"

"No!" Eliot's reply is immediate and vehement and even Parker with her limited training from Sophie can see that he's lying. She grins and kisses him on his very red cheek before slipping off the counter and heading towards the cupboard.

"I'm gonna go lay the table."

Eliot grunts in response, clearly finished with the conversation. She grins and heads out to the table with a stack of plates, considering what presents she can steal for her family. After all, she's never really cared about people before, and she wants them to know that they're different. She glances back at Eliot stirring his sauce in the kitchen, and then grins at Hardison as he rolls his eyes at her before subtly gesturing to Nate and Sophie who are in the middle of another 'friendly disagreement'.

Parker is a great thief, and she knows what things are worth, so she thinks about all the things her new family have done for her and decides that a little fear is a good trade-off.

_Mastermind_

Nate is terrified of hospitals. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows why too. Fewer people are aware that his fear of failure is nearly as crippling, and quite intertwined. He failed his son, failed him terribly, (he should have forced the insurance company to pay up for his treatment, found some…leverage) and when Sam died, he knew that it was his fault.

And then Maggie left and Sterling took his job (well, maybe Nate threw it away and Sterling, always in the right place at the right time, had caught it) and Nate was busy drinking himself into a stupor, and he would probably have died if Victor Dubenich (the stupid, sorry, son-of-a-bitch) hadn't introduced him to his new family, and hell if that didn't terrify him.

Because there's nothing quite as demoralising as failing your family, and Nate thought he'd solved that by getting rid of the last of his family, so to suddenly have a whole new set of people to fail…well, it kind of made him want to stay in bed and never get up to face the world ever again. Unfortunately, he can't do that, because now his team are depending on him and not getting up in the morning would fail them just as effectively as if one of his plans fell through on the job. It's a catch 22, and Nate doesn't know how to get out of it.

As he works with his team, as his team change from 'bunch of random people to work with on the biggest con ever' to 'family', he realises that his team have something to teach him, possibly the most important something of his life: delegation. It doesn't sound like much, in fact, it sounds like a bunch of corporate BS that wouldn't be out of place in any of the headquarters of the corrupt industrial giants that Nate and the team have brought down.

For Nate though, it means something huge. In his mind, delegation is synonymous with trust, and he hasn't trusted anybody, really trusted them, for far longer than he can remember. He is fully capable of acknowledging the irony that the first people he chooses to trust after years alone are a group of thieves, grifters and con-artists.

Still, as his trust in his team grows, he finds that his need to control every aspect of a con (of his life) fades, and he delegates, minor tasks at first, but growing in size and importance, until finally he feels confident enough to let Hardison run a whole con (even if his teeth hurt for the entire thing). His urge to micromanage every aspect of everything is still there, but slowly it's subsumed by his trust in his team, his belief that they can get it right.

One day, after he's asked Parker (Parker!) to manage procuring a large hog (don't ask, it's vital to the con), and he doesn't worry about it while she's gone, merely assumes that she will have it in the right place at the right time, he realises what a weight is actually lifted from his shoulders by his trust in his team. The threat of failure is, if not gone, alleviated to a point that he can hardly feel it. It feels like taking a deep breath after years underwater, and as he stands there, blinded by his enlightenment, he wonders if his team know what they mean to him, if they know how much they've improved his life. He has a sneaking suspicion that they do and if they don't, well, Nate will just have to spend the rest of his life showing them.

_-Fin-_

**x-x**

You may have noticed that Nate's part is a lot shorter than everybody else. This is because I'm not a huge fan of the character, and found him very difficult to write for. Hope you enjoyed it nonetheless! :)

- CSI


End file.
